


The Sins Of The Father

by kalypsobean



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 13:06:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2069358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The sins of the father shall be laid upon the sons</i> - Shakespeare, 'The Merchant of Venice'</p>
<p>Maedhros and Fingon were meant to be, until everything happened and they never made it, out of loyalty and honour and noble things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sins Of The Father

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ansileran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ansileran/gifts).



> For ansileran as part of AinA 2014, for prompt: 'Maedhros/Fingon, any rating, Silmarillion based: Fingon rescued Maedhros, but they ended up living in different places. Why?'
> 
> Well, Maedhros thinks too much and Fingon is unattainable. Also, there's kind of a war on.

Maedhros has had a lot of time to think.

It wasn't quite that way at first, for his mind had been filled with other things, things like hatred and despair and self-pity. They had been edged out by the pain, slowly, like the growth of a curse that eats away at the flesh leaving naught but madness in its wake. It had begun in his shoulder, the part that held the rest of him to the captive arm, and spread across his back and chest. His hand was next; it sent pain down his arm, through his wrist and elbow, and doubled that he already felt, until it had reached his mind and his toes, as if his body was wreathed inside and out in fire. If he had needed to sleep it would have been hardly of use in healing, but instead he gained rest only from delirium and delusion, that which made the agony less consuming when compared.

The memories started as if the Valar were granting him an escape from the unending torment, still present like an undercurrent of inky black marring his vision. They were dreams, he thought at first, unusually lucid and remote, but dreams all the same. Containing no guidance or message, they distracted him until the pain was as a second nature to breath, haphazard and fragmented though they were. He would be under the Trees, their light soft on the grass and the fountain, and they would be withered and small, lifeless. His father would hold the Jewels in his hands, high up into the sky, and it would be their light around him, tinged with red. Fingon would be there, laughing and carefree as if they were young, before the rift between their fathers formed and drove down amongst Elfkind until they were sundered and split as they are now, scattered and dead beneath him, hanging from the sky like he'd reached too far and was unable to return.

Fingon.

There lay his regret, if he could be said to have one. Before evil rose, irrevocably casting his dark spell and seducing those whose hearts were unguarded, they had a future in which they ruled together, sons of their fathers and friends near from birth. That was when Fingon's heart was still pure and he did not know of sadness or hatred; that was when his own knew honour as a promise to be kept and consequences to be mild. They'd dreamed of returning to Beleriand and bringing the Avari the light of Aman, teaching even the smallest animals of the Valar, until all the world was bathed in the same gold and silver hues they took for granted. For a while, they had even been closer than friends, but his father had seen to that. 

Maedhros is not sure that it was unintentional. His father's motives still remain a mystery, to be forever unsolved. It would be petty, if it had been so, but not beyond what he knew his father to be.

There is one memory that comes to him repeatedly, always clear and structured; it comes with the smell of smoke and the pain of grief, an internal pain that lances his fëa anew with each remembrance. The blood that still runs down his arm burns as if it is not his own but of all those he killed, before his father told him they would not go back, and he faced being sundered from his own kin and the friendship he treasured above all else. If he were able to change it now, he would, for then he had still been in awe of his father and afraid to cross him, and now the price was becoming too high, too long, and the devastation wrought and still to come tore at all that he'd loved and still had to see, that he would never know as untouched.

He drinks from the rain and his strength fades, but it does not take him. His father's blood is too strong for that, and Maedhros rues it as the skies grow darker, and he hears the cries of his kindred as if the wind itself wishes to join in his punishment.

 

It's one of those times when there's nothing; he's long past the point where pain and discomfort matter to him, and even the simplest thought is vague and twisted beyond coherence. He wonders at first whether the dark shape, grey against the night, is another torture devised for him, but it does not disappear when it becomes defined, when it angles feathered wings and descends towards him, when music is the first sound he hears that isn't the whisper of a howling, brutal wind.

"Leave me," he tries to cry out, but his voice is taken by that same unyielding wind, his throat too dry and his lungs too sore to fight it. 

Fingon reaches for him, then, and it's the first time he's known warmth since Morgoth left him here never to die. 

"Let me die," he says, but Fingon's arrow severs his wrist and he's falling to the eagle's back, to Fingon's chest, before he even thinks that he should attempt to evade Fingon's ever-perfect aim.

 

Maedhros thought that, too, was a dream; he thought he had finally found oblivion and the path to Námo's halls, where his sins could be understood and forgiveness earned in time, where his cursed blood would do no more unwitting harm. Nothingness is warm and still, filled with the sounds of voices and footsteps, the smells of fresh bread and oil, even the taste of clean air.

"Did you really think I would just leave you to die, cousin?" Fingon says, when Maedhros dares open his eyes, only to see that the warmth is not a lie. The new sun shines off the gold in Fingon's hair, beautiful and blinding and everything he should no longer have a right to.

"You should have," he says, and his voice, it seems, has not healed; his arm is bandaged and there is salve covering the rawest patches of skin, but he feels as if his throat will never be whole again. 

"It isn't up to us to decide the fate of others, or ourselves." Fingon stands; he had been sitting in a window seat, and Maedhros is torn between wondering at how quickly this had been built with such luxury and studying Fingon's light armour and the new scars it doesn't cover. Some are still surrounded by red skin, and if Maedhros had been stronger, they may well not have been there at all. "Stay," Fingon says, as if the desire to run had been more evident than his failed attempt at moving. "We are too few to do without you." 

Maedhros hears what Fingon is really saying; he has not forgotten their code, the way they learned to talk of each other in terms of their houses and obligations without reference to themselves, as if they already knew their blood denied them choices before their paths were shrouded and illuminated in tears. 

"I won't pull you down with me, cousin," he says to the empty room, when Fingon has left and the stars look in on him like the dead reminding him of his debt. Even when all the Houses meet and divide the land, pledging peace and alliance, he declares for peace but demands the furthest territory; he has been marked, his path was set by his father and the oath he swore in fear and loyalty. He will always come, his words say, but this thing cannot be while his father's blood still rules him and his brothers deal in vengeance and death.

 

It is many years before he joins with Fingon, at the end, and that only when he is marked unworthy to have done so. It is a brief moment, before his fëa looks for healing, but it is what could have been, and it drives him until the world is broken anew.


End file.
